War Girls

by Tochi Onyebuchi

  “That’s beautiful,” Ify says, wondering if, instead, she should say, Allahu akbar.

  “But that is the first time I remember hearing it, not the first time I heard it.”

  “When was the first time you heard it?”

  “When I first came into the world. Those were the first words my father whispered into my ear.” Her gaze focuses on Ify, and it’s filled with love. “As I’m sure your father whispered it into yours.”

  When the van comes to a stop, Ify is still staring slack-jawed at Daurama. So many questions dart through her brain. Who is this woman, and what has she done with Daurama?

  The older woman climbs out, and Ify sees that they’ve arrived at the library. That’s right. The Colony Placement Exams are in a few months. She has to study. But the shock from Daurama’s words still hasn’t left her.

  “Don’t worry,” Daurama says by the open door. “My brother is not angry with you. He is just busy. He sends his love.”

  Just as Daurama’s about to leave, Ify calls out, “Daurama!”

  She stops and raises an eyebrow.

  “I want to go on hajj. With you and Daren.” Is this what Daurama had been waiting for? To see that Ify really believed? That she no longer prayed to the gods of the Biafrans? Is that it? She realizes that it is not a small thing to want, to wait for. To see conversion happen in a person. To know for certain that they share your faith, this quiet, understated part of your being. Yes, I am a proud Muslim, she wants to tell Daurama. She wants to shout it. But, instead, she waits.

  “Sure, sister,” Daurama says. “I must leave for some time. But as soon as I return from my next mission, we will prepare. And you can finally make your first hajj.”

  Sure, sister. Those two words stay with Ify the entire rest of the afternoon. She isn’t able to study a single lesson.

  “Allahu akbar,” she whispers into her tablet, grinning. Glowing.

  CHAPTER

  25

  Onyii lies prone by a window in the stone tower of a bombed-out building. She has been lying there for a long time. In the memory, she’s a child. Barely ten years old.

  She rises to stretch her legs and glance out the window at the abandoned street below. Night has fallen, casting everything in a dark blue hue. When she hears footsteps from down the hall, she scrambles to the window and puts her eye to the scope of her sniper rifle. She is not supposed to have left her post, even for a second. And when Adaeze enters, Onyii tenses to see if her handler will have noticed she spent a few moments away from her post.

  Onyii lies on the floor of the tower with her sniper rifle before her and with Adaeze behind her. I will get it right. This is her chance.

  Their target, a prominent Nigerian official, leaves the build-ing, having snuck out and avoided his own security detail, probably for a breath of fresh air. This is her chance.

  Onyii adjusts the zoom and thinks of Adaeze and hopes that when she finishes, she will see that look on Ada’s face that she saw when she first joined her as a soldier. A soft, warm, proud smile.

  Onyii pulls the trigger.

  The sound of the dream-gunshot raises Onyii from her slumber.

  It takes her nearly a minute to calm her breathing. Sweat chills her skin. She searches for her satchel and fiddles around the pockets for that little vial of Chukwu, but when she finds it, she tips it and sees nothing but emptiness. Angry, she tosses the vial across the room.

  Already, Onyii feels antsy, like she’s spent too much time standing still. She realizes, rising to her feet, that she misses the inside of her mech. The glowing screens, the feel of the gearshifts in her hands, the hum and whirr and groan of the metal moving around her. She closes her eyes and wraps herself in her arms and can feel the warmth running through her body. She feels like she herself has begun to glow. The moment passes, and she stands alone in the too-quiet room. With a sigh, she slips into a pair of combat pants and leaves.

  She has finally mastered the compound’s hallways and corridors, and, pretty soon, she arrives at Chinelo’s office. Light spills out from under the closed doors. A different set of guards stands outside the office.

  “Is she in?” Onyii asks, and one of them nods. “She taking visitors?”

  The two look at each other, trying to figure out what to do next.

  Onyii wants to push past them, assert herself, but she’s tired of fighting for now.

  One of the guards puts a finger to his earpiece. Onyii expects him to say something, but his eyes glaze over, and she realizes he’s transmitting information. Then the guard’s eyes return to normal. “You can go,” he says, softly. He presses the keypad, and the door whisks open.

  Onyii is on her guard as she walks through, ready to defend herself, but Chiamere stands by the far wall, arms folded. He stares at Onyii when she enters.

  Chinelo has a holo out in front of her, a rotating three-dimensional display of a launch site, it looks like. “Can’t sleep?”

  “Never could,” Onyii says back.

  The 3-D map vanishes, and Chinelo looks up. “How do you like him?”

  “Agu?”

  “Yeah.”

  Onyii smirks and scratches the back of her head. “He’s learning how to play the piano.”

  Chinelo squints at Onyii for a second before saying, “Is he, now?” She folds up the projector tablet on her desk, then walks to the front and leans against the edge. She folds her arms just like her abd. “Do you want to see him in action?” When Onyii raises an eyebrow, Chinelo continues. “It’s only been a few weeks since you got here. Normally, I’d wait for the bonding period to finish between a sister and her abd before bringing them into combat, but we just received intel on something big. And we can’t afford to wait.”

  Anticipation thrills through Onyii. She tries to steady her voice and not let it show. “What is it?”

  “We just got word that the Nigerians are expecting a shipment of mechs from the British Space Colonies. They’ll be dropping off somewhere along the coast and heading inland from there. The Commonwealth Colonies are supposed to be neutral in this conflict. But they’ve been meeting with the Nigerian military. One of their best pilots has apparently been leading the deal. Sucking at the white man’s teat. If we can do this raid right, we can expose them and maybe get other nations on our side. And we can steal their hardware while we’re at it. What we don’t take, we destroy.” She frowns at Onyii in silence for several seconds. “You ready?”

  And Onyii knows that Chinelo is asking if she’ll stop snorting those minerals. If she’ll get herself clean and put herself back together. If she can keep the bad thoughts and bloody memories at bay long enough to work with others and get this mission done. Chinelo doesn’t need the Demon of Biafra for this one. She needs Onyii.

  This is her chance.

  I will get it right.

  “Yes.”

  * * *

  It doesn’t take long to summon the others, and an hour later, they are all seated at a massive table in the center of the briefing room connected to Chinelo’s office. On it glows a digital map of the world. Chinelo stands at the head of the table and swipes across the touchboard in the head console. The vision zooms into a map of Nigeria, green where the Nigerians rule, red for the poisoned irradiated zone of the Redlands that winds like a jagged wound across Nigeria’s middle, and yellow for the portion of southeast Nigeria under Biafran control.

  Though Chinelo’s voice is low, it carries through the room. “The mission is to gather and broadcast intelligence about the mechs sent from the Commonwealth Colonies, show proof that the neutrality they speak of is a farce and they’ve been helping the Nigerian government commit genocide against the Biafrans, steal what mechs we can, then get out of there as fast as we can.”

  The young women lean against the consoles lining the walls while their abd stand beside them, eyes glazed as they download
information. It’s unnerving to look at, the abd downloading scenarios and calculating probabilities while Chinelo speaks. It reminds Onyii that, at the end of the day, these boys are machines.

  “Makoko needs to be awake for this plan to even get off the ground,” Chinelo says before swiping again at the tablet. The image zooms in further on a slum just outside of Lagos. Makoko is a small water city with shanties jutting out from the mainland. The buildings rest on rusty metal stilts sunk into Lagos Lagoon’s muddy bed. In the hologram that rises out of the table screen, people crowd along the wooden walls, waxy with wear, of those buildings. Others travel from their schools to their homes and their shops in canoes. Hawkers stand in their own boats, shouting up at people walking across the rickety bridges with their wares in their outstretched hands.

  “It won’t be as noisy as Lagos,” Chinelo continues, “but it should be enough motion and busyness to mask us. They still use generators there. We’ll fly low and settle along the coast in a little enclave here, not too far from the city. There’s enough brush to hide us. Then we’ll disable the mechs. We won’t be going back to them. We’ll get to Makoko, and from there, we’ll head inland to the Okpai oil fields.”

  Ginika unfolds her arms. The half-sun tattoo on her shoulder glows blue in the light from the hologram. “Why not just go through the forest?” When she points at the table map, the image of Makoko falls away, and they’re staring at a two-dimensional image of southeastern Nigeria again. “That way, we avoid detection.”

  From a nearby corner, Obioma says, “Too close to Lagos, which is still a Nigerian stronghold. They still hold too much of the coastline.”

  Her abd breaks out of his trance to say, “And there are many shorthorns in that forest. And two-fangs and Agba bears.”

  “If they are a problem for the Nigerians,” Obioma finishes, “they will be a problem for us.”

  Chinelo looks from Ginika to Obioma, then returns her gaze to the map, shifting to the Okpai oil fields. She pulls up a map of what looks like an abandoned structure with drilling towers rusty from disuse. Trailers fill the field at random. Then a larger multistory building connects outward to two large octagonal structures held up out of the water by struts at each corner.

  Kesandu brushes away the shock of hair covering her eye. “Where are they hiding the special mechs?”

  “Somewhere underground,” Onyii says, realizing belatedly that she said the words out loud. “The map’s incomplete, isn’t it?” Onyii meets Chinelo’s gaze, and it feels almost like a challenge. This is the first time someone has pointed out a hole in her plans.

  “We have no idea what the lower level looks like,” Chinelo confirms. “We’ll be going in blind.”

  The air grows tense between them. Suddenly, Onyii barks out a laugh. Everyone looks at her in confusion, even Agu. But she palms her stomach and quiets down. “That is just how I like it,” she says at last. “This plan of yours was starting to sound too safe. You should know by now that I don’t do safe.”

  The others smirk. Their expressions seem to say, Neither do we.

  “All right,” Chinelo says, turning off the display. “We head out before dawn. Everybody, get some rest.”

  As they stream out, Chinelo goes ahead of Onyii. When she reaches the entrance, she looks back at Onyii with a question in her eyes: Was that challenge to my authority real? Onyii stares back, then winks. You were starting to sound too full of yourself, sister, she thinks. You are still the girl who jokes about how badly I used to smell. Don’t forget that.

  CHAPTER

  26

  Ify sits in the balcony while, below, the men—scientists and lawmakers and government advisers, all with their specific colored stripe at their right shoulder—surround the large table at the center of the room. Another one of Daren’s security conferences. There are very few people with Ify in these top rows and only a few more in benches toward the entrance to this particular hall. Today’s session is a boring one: climate control and forest fires. And, indeed, some of the government advisers sit against the wall with their heads bowed and their knees crossed, their dangling feet bouncing and twisting idly to some music they’re probably listening to in their half-sleep.

  Daren is one of the only government officials standing. He takes position, arms folded on one side of the table, his back to Ify, while the scientists face him. Nervously, their gazes flit from Daren to the advisers lining the wall, as though they’re unsure of whom they need to try harder to convince.

  “But you see, that very rule mandating fire suppression is the problem,” says a scientist with a light fuzz of gray on his otherwise bald head. “The landscape south of us is too complex, too diverse. Rising temperatures dry out the higher elevations. Insects that harsh winters would normally kill survive and kill more trees, eating them from the inside out. And dead trees burn more easily than live ones.”

  “I still don’t see any problem with the Sunrise Rule,” says one of the ministers with a fez on his head. His robe is all white, almost blinding. He lounges in a chair by the wall, and his red-slippered foot bounces in and out of a beam of sunlight coming from a window above. “Any forest fire that breaks out, extinguish it by sunrise.”

  “And leave more dead trees on our mountains and near our towns like so much kindling!” The scientist, spectacles sliding down the bridge of his sweat-slick nose, turns to the table, pulls a tablet out of his coat, and inputs a sequence. A hologram rises from the table: a fire spreading like a knife scar at the bottom of the border with the Redlands. Flames silently lick the air. The hologram changes angles, and it looks as though the camera is flying through the blaze.

  A drone must have taken this footage.

  From this view, the fire looks suddenly real. The closeness of it. It reaches roadway, and Ify realizes that the fire has spread to more populated areas. Still sparse but not quite wilderness. And that’s when they all see the maglev cars lining the road, made black and gray and calcified from having roasted. Shapes lie scattered on the road. Misshapen black lumps. They could have been anything. Or anyone.

  The drone camera angles upward, and it appears as though fire has consumed everything, but then the drone shoots into the sky, and they watch everything from above.

  With a single swipe of his tablet, the scientist wipes away the vision. “Before the Sunrise Rule, fire would regularly clear out the deadwood. Now all those trees are left to stand dead and skeletal, waiting for fire to smolder and reach them.”

  What do you think?

  Ify starts. That voice. Daren?

  You have a nasty habit when you get tired of drifting into other people’s heads.

  It’s true. With her Accent on, every Augmented person within her network becomes a glowing node, and if she doesn’t pay attention, she will float toward them, like a moth drawn to flame. If she’s not careful, she can drift straight past the barriers put up to protect a person’s brain, accessing all of their information, everything that makes them them. Ify smirks. They shouldn’t leave their doors open.

  Daren’s shoulders rise with a single chuckle, but he doesn’t look her way. Instead, he faces the table where, just a moment earlier, fire had roared. What do you think?

  People choose to live there. And they know the land.

  Daren nods, then raises his head to face the scientist. “Many of these people did not heed the evacuation order until it was too late. They decided long ago that they would not be scared every time a plume of smoke rises in the air.”

  The scientist has a pleading look in his eyes. “But, sir, not everywhere is meant for human habitation.”

  Ify frowns at the scientist from her seat in the balcony. How does he know where those people are meant or aren’t meant to live?

  “Maybe they are fire-adapted,” Daren says. He walks over to the table and touches some of the buttons on the console closest to him. It’s the aftermath of the
firestorm. There are still people there, crawling out of holes they had dug or bunkers they had prepared, some of them emerging from desert perilously close to the Redlands but far enough from the fire to guarantee safety. And slowly they pick up and put their lives back together. “Maybe they are working not to exclude fire but rather to learn to live with it.”

  A transmission buzzes over his private channel. Ify’s still inside his head. She can still see everything. She’s about to disconnect, but Daren, forgetting that she remains inside his head, opens the message.

  “Sir, there’s been an attack,” says the voice on the other end. “An oil outpost off the coast. In the Delta region. They have hostages.”

  Ify gasps. This is not what she expected. But she can’t turn away. Not now.

  Do we have surveillance images?

  A holoscreen appears before Daren’s face and fills with a series of images that are almost entirely black. The images enhance their resolution, then zoom in, then change their brightness. They show figures clad in all black manning positions along walkways circling the massive octagonal buildings propped up by beams. A wide view of the structure reveals nearby oil derricks. Mechs face out from the shore toward the water. Another set of holos reveals more figures inside the facility, frozen in mid-run on metal walkways, standing guard with their high-powered rifles outside generator rooms; then, in one small space, several of them form a circle around men bound and gagged, smushed together so that their backs face each other. Some of them are unconscious, others bleeding.

  In another room, darker with fuzzier resolution, the silhouette of two giant mechs, so tall their heads vanish in the shadows. Igwe. The word swims across Ify’s consciousness. Igwe. Those are the mechs Daren had been talking about with the oyinbo.

  Along a walkway by the cockpit of the first Igwe are two figures frozen in a crouched run. He zooms in on one of them, enhances the photo, then zooms in further.